Sausage Making

I have posted a few sausage recipes below. There are quite literally thousands or recipes for sausages. From the earliest Roman soldier's ration to the modern rubbish served from hot metal trolleys to drunk tourists. The tradition of taking pork meat and storing it in a handy sausage skin is as old as civilisation itself. The scope for variation (and abomination) is immense.

I guess what we all aspire to create when we set out to make our first sausages is a classic English breakfast sausage. The recipe posted below for 'Regular Breakfast Sausage' has the benefit of being straight forward and low on the effort quotient. Sausages in the UK tend to be made of around 80% pork with the balance made up of rusk (yeastless bread crumb), water and spices.


The addition of water and rusk might appear to be detracting from the wonderful pork you are stuffing into your sausage skins. However, the rusk and water help to promote a moist texture and soak up some of the juices and fat from the gently cooked meat.

It is entirely up to you, as sausage designer, whether you want to vary these ratios. You might prefer a sausage with 100% pork and only spices added, Toulouse sausages are like this. You may prefer to add breadcrumb and Stilton and only have 50% pork meat, pretty much anything goes.

The other established practise that is also open for experimentation is the inclusion of a certain amount of fat. Traditionally, one would use around 50:50 mixtures of shoulder and belly pork, minced. With a naturally reared, rare breed pig you would normally expect a higher proportion of fat in the meat already. Therefore we have settled on using mostly shoulder meat for our sausages. I like to save the belly joints for slow roasting or for using in pork rillets.

Then there is the spice. Around 1-2% by weight is normally salt. The other regular is pepper, in both black or white forms. Herbs, well that is your option.


So there you have it, 80% pork, 20% rusk/water and 2% spices and you have made your sausage mix. While keeping the mixture cold, mush it all up in a nice clean mixing bowl and stuff into your sausage skins. Mr P has very kindly offered the loan of his excellent sausage stuffing machine so we're in business for the sausage making day on 2nd May.

If mixing up your own sausage mixtures seems like hard work, I can recommend the mixture from the website www.sausagemaking.org called Old English Breakfast. It is maybe a little commercial but the results are consistently good. Also, while at the e-store, buy some natural sausage skins and some rusk and you will have all the ingredients you need.

Jamon Libre!